Would you use 2d animation tools if they were implemented in Blender?

For clarification, this means traditional hand drawn animation using the texture paint brushes. If your answer is yes, please comment a feature (or features) that you would consider essential to a 2d animation workflow. If your answer is “why the hell would we add 2d animation features to a 3d software?”, please give me a moment to defend my sanity.

 First of all, Blender already has a pretty good foundation for 2d animation. Namely the texture paint brushes, animation editors, compositor, and vse. If done correctly, these could create a very tightly integrated 2d animation pipeline. Secondly, modern 2d animation software like Toon Boom Harmony includes basic 3d capability for things like creating parallax for 2d layers and support for 3d models of things that may be too hard to draw/animate. Blender being a 3d software, we already have a leg up there. Finally, these tools could also be used for creating animated textures for 3d animations or games which could be interesting. So tell me what you think. I'm looking into developing some basic 2d features and I just wanted to see if there was any interest. Thanks for listening to my rambling.

One important thing is that texture painting in Blender might need to be established well firstly to be used as a foundation.

By saying “established” I want to say that texture painting currently it works as it works at a basic level, but still it has some features it really needs. Some considerable features would be Layers with groups and blend modes, marquee selections and transformation. One ideal application for me is PaintToolSAI, despite the fact that it has 10 features all, it allows you to do “everything” you need in one go.

Provided that there is this functionality available, even more users perhaps will bypass other software and use Blender for 2D work. Once painting in Blender becomes popular my estimation is that even more people will try 2D animation.

P.S. What is your opinion about Grease Pencil animation?

I’d love to see a great open-source tool for 2D animation but personally I feel like this effort might be better suited for Krita while Blender focuses on furthering its 3D capabilities. I hugely appreciate anyone’s dedication to contribute to either of these great projects (Blender & Krita) but for the sake of efficiency it might make sense to avoid unnecessary redundancy between the two and focus 2D efforts on Krita and 3D efforts on Krita.

Just my two cents. :slight_smile:

Where’s the option for “I already do use Blender for 2D animation”?

Krita is getting there :slight_smile:

I would rather see texture paint layers in blender first. Support for image frames in texture painting should come later and would also be useful for normal texture painting worflow - using frames to store different stages or variations of a texture is very very useful.

@Fweeb
^Agree… downgraded from 3D to 2D. It’s just a mindset.

We used 3d to create “flat” 2d stills or “flat” 2d animation. What we see on video games and vfx in movies are “flat” 2d animation. :smiley:

One important thing is that texture painting in Blender might need to be established well firstly to be used as a foundation.

Yes, definitely. I’d say that layers is probably the single biggest missing feature. This was getting kicked around a few months ago, not sure what the status on it is now.

P.S. What is your opinion about Grease Pencil animation?

The GP is actually what got me into 2D. However, there’s a few quarks that make it kinda hard to work with. The new sculpting tools look really cool so maybe I’ll start playing with it again.

I’d love to see a great open-source tool for 2D animation but personally I feel like this effort might be better suited for Krita while Blender focuses on furthering its 3D capabilities.

A very fair point. But before any kind of drawn animation tools can be implemented, a lot of work will need to be done to the Image Editor. Any IE improvements will most likely be targeted at texture painters, which stays well in the realm of 3D. Also keep in mind, I’m not asking the Devs for these features, this thread is just to get some ideas for features that I can implement. The Devs will continue on more important projects.

Where’s the option for “I already do use Blender for 2D animation”?

My apologies! What tools do you use for your animations?

This is all well and good, but where are the resources to work on 2d animation meant to be coming from?

but where are the resources to work on 2d animation meant to be coming from?

Honestly, no where. This is all very hypothetical.

Depends on the aesthetic. Grease Pencil is fantastic for pencil tests, but it could also be used for more finished-looking work. Imported images as planes or even SVGs works well for cut-out animation. 2D curves (and flat meshes, if you’re patient) themselves can be animated with shape key, hooks, and/or armatures.

So yeah… there’s a lot of 2D things that can already be done.

I’m working in 2d animation with blender just now. I’d like ONLY two features and Blender would be a perfect tool for 2d animation:

  1. Live preview of freehand.
  2. Better 2d curve objects.
    This is a little test of turning head:

Seems like a pretty cool idea to me.

Christmas time xD

There’s already a lot of tools for, say, cutout-style animation (like in this animation I did myself). There we could use some workflow-oriented tools, but nothing comes to my mind right now since I had no real showtoppers.

If we were to do “real” 2D, i’d love a dedicated 2D-bones system that can be exported to 2D game engines likes COCOS, maybe in a Spine-style editor/mode. So yes, have Spine inside Blender basically, with 3D option and all the awesome rigging tools that Blender has. I don’t mean coding all this from scratch, but that’s not for me to talk about since I’m no coder :stuck_out_tongue:

On the “draw everything inside Blender” side, we’d need painting layers per texture, not multiple separated textures with tricky setups in BI like now, and a better (ore clearer) brush engine. The settings now are quite obscure IMO.
Then 2D animation window preview with onion skinning, à la Flash :slight_smile: - Kirta’s brush/image layers engine and Flash’s animation editor, that would do the job ^^

Also a proper layer system with ‘n’ number of layers per scene, all named and color-tagged. Seriously, we need this in blender. Groups are OK, but they really feel like a workaround.

That would be my requests. I’ve used other software as examples of good and working designs, I’m sure we can find a “blender” approach to all this :slight_smile:

@chris
Exactly.

If you specialise in 2D/Cel animation then you wouldn’t use a program like Blender or Maya to do it, you would instead use a program such as Toon Boom’s Harmony.

Imagine this: a new open-source application that handles 2D animation and story boarding. THAT would be a welcome addition to GIMP, Krita and Blender.